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Day: June 20, 2012

The Right has had a major conniption over possible legislative attempts to expose their millionaire donors to the Romney campaign.

Yet Darrell Issa and company are just about ready to explode over the idea of President Obama claiming executive privilege over certain White House connected high level documents pertaining to the Department of Justice’s Fast and Furious campaign.

The hypocrisy and double standard is astounding but that’s not even the half of it…

President Obama is asserting executive privilege over documents Republicans are requesting from the Department of Justice in the Fast and Furious investigation.

“After you rejected the Department’s recent offers of additional accommodations, you stated that the Committee intends to proceed with its scheduled meeting to consider a resolution citing the Attorney General for contempt for failing to comply with the Committee’s subpoena of October 11, 2011,” James M. Cole, the Deputy Attorney General wrote in a letter to House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) Wednesday morning. “I write now to inform you that the President has asserted executive privilege over the relevant post-February 4, 2011, documents.” The move is certainly not unprecedented: President George W. Bush asserted executive privilege six times during his eight years in office, while President Bill Clinton did so 14 times.

UPDATE

Issa on March 20, 2012: “We very clearly want to respect the history of executive privilege.”

UPDATE

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on June 11, 2012: “The only constitutionally viable exception to the Department of Justice`s obligation under the subpoena would be executive privilege. The President hasnt asserted that privilege, presumably because the vast majority of the documents at issue aren’t related to communications with the White House. Because the documents don’t fit the category of executive privilege, the department is obligated to turn over the documents.”

UPDATE

Responding to Obama’s use of executive privilege, Issa says “the untimely assertion by the Justice Department falls short of any reason to delay today’s proceedings.”

UPDATE

Grassley has also issued a statement decrying Obama’s action: “The assertion of executive privilege raises monumental questions. How can the President assert executive privilege if there was no White House involvement? How can the President exert executive privilege over documents he’s supposedly never seen? Is something very big being hidden to go to this extreme? The contempt citation is an important procedural mechanism in our system of checks and balances. The questions from Congress go to determining what happened in a disastrous government program for accountability and so that it’s never repeated again.”

UPDATE

The House Oversight Committee will consider this contempt resolution, which Democrats are opposing. As Rep. Elijiah Cummings (D-MD) explained to Issa, “You accused him of a cover-up for protecting documents that he was prohibited by law from producing.”

CNN contributor and Newsweek columnist John Avlon on Tuesday accused Mitt Romney of lying about vetting Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to be his running mate.

Sources close to the Romney campaign told ABC News on Monday that Rubio was not being vetted, suggesting Romney had no interested in picking him as his vice presidential candidate. But on Tuesday, Romney declared that Rubio was “being thoroughly vetted as part of our process.”

“He was trying to clean up a political mess,” Avlon said. “Because someone told the truth and it was an unnecessary insult and it was causing real problems for the campaign. This is political.”

At that time, Krugman warned Obama in an editorial, that his stimulus was too small and would only slow down the country’s economic comeback. As it turned out, he was right and he’s right about the country being in trouble if Romney is elected.

If Mitt Romney is elected president, the U.S. will experience an economic disaster the likes of which have been recently seen in Ireland, according to Paul Krugman.

“Ireland is Romney economics in practice,” the Nobel-Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist said on the Colbert Report on Monday. “I think Ireland is America’s future if Romney is president.” (h/t Politico.)

“They’ve laid off a large fraction of their public workforce, they’ve slashed spending, they’ve had extreme austerity programs, they haven’t really raised taxes on corporations or the rich at all, they have 14 percent unemployment, 30 percent youth unemployment, zero economic growth,” Krugman said.

Conservatives like Romney loved Ireland’s economic program before the country fell into a depression, in part because it had “the lowest corporate tax rates,” Krugman said on the Colbert Report. Ireland fell into recession again at the end of last year.

After Krugman finished his criticism of Romney’s economic plan, there was a pause as Colbert tried to think of a good retort. “Well the Irish can handle it, OK? The Irish do very well in bleak, depressing times,” Colbert said. “They’ve got those jigs and everything that they do.”